The Children’s Book

Note: This long novel would be enjoyed by people who liked the multi-layered historical novel Possession (1990) by the same author. I read Hynes’ The Edwardian Turn of Mind in preparation for this novel, which I approached with respect. So I had moorings when Byatt referred to Emmaline Pankhurst, Edward Carpenter, Beerbohm Tree. Another book to get ready would be Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914.

The Children’s Book – A.S. Byatt

This saga of the Wellwood family is set in England in the late Victorian era (1890s) through the Edwardian era (1901 – 1910) to 1919, the aftermath of the Great War. It is both a sobering examination of how hazardous the world is for women and children and a look at the era’s decorative arts, puppetry, children’s literature, and movements such as theosophy, Fabianism, anarchism, vegetarianism, feminism, nudism, free love, and the love that dare not speak its name.

It is 1895. Philip Warren has fled to London from the pottery factories in the north of England. Instead of living rough in the dangerous East End, he is hiding away in the basement of the South Kensington Museum. This mission of this unique repository: display a variety of objects to give crafters, artisans, and artists of all classes inspiration for their own personal creativity, works of art or commercial projects. Philip is creative and artistic through his mother who painted pottery until she died of lead poisoning from the paint. Philip sketches inspired renderings of artifacts, which catch the eye of the director of the museum Prosper Cain.

Cain uses his connections to get Philip an apprenticeship with a famous if reclusive potter Benedict Fludd. Like more than a few genius artists, Fludd has no sense for minding the practical details of life and making a living so the family is distressed with economic insecurity. Worse, Fludd is plagued with cyclical bipolar disorder. His manic highs and lows and their terrible consequences have caused his wife and daughters grief and worry to the point they have checked out emotionally and socially. Teen daughter Pomona is so anxious that she sleepwalks. Son Geraint, content not being creative at all and longing for a normal family, wants nothing more than to get out of the madhouse and become a banker, make money, and be comfortable. Philip’s sister Elsie escapes the north too and ends up keeping house in the hapless Fludd household.

Philip has friendly relations with the family of Olive and Humphry Wellwood. Olive is a successful writer of popular fiction for children and Humphrey has been a well-off banker but has turned to social activist journalism. Their strained finances demand Olive write like mad and she always feels fear of losing the country house in Kent. At the start of the novel, their children are Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis, Hedda, and Florian.

Since artists don’t see to new shoes and meals and dishes and cleaning, Olive’s sister Violet runs the household and does mothering duty for the kids. The Wellwood's hippie-type milieu is, as mentioned above, is as George Orwell summed up “…that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Pal George is thinking of bearded Edward Carpenter, who made his own sandals, had a working-class male partner, and unwittingly fed the image of socialist as utopian crank to the general public.

With so many people pursuing so many goals, this is a novel that interweaves numerous stories, mainly concerned with the failure of parents to pay enough attention to their children and treat them as living individuals, not “the children” or worse “your children.” It’s also a tendency of the middle-class characters to see the working-class characters as personifications of social ills instead of living individuals.

Byatt also explores themes such as the artist as parent and the artist as moral agent and guide. She reminds us that it is often surprising and sad to find out about the lives of artists, to discover they live their lives as messily as anybody else. Byatt makes the point that we are not really meant to meet authors and other artists.

Byatt also uses not only realism in easy-to-follow prose but also delivers brilliant pastiches of E. Nesbit’s children’s literature. Byatt captures Nesbit’s intertwining of love and grief, scary and safe, phantasy and hard knocks. However, inspired by the decorative arts of the era, Byatt also describes rooms and clothes and artifacts to an elaborate degree that rivals Edith Wharton.

The description of pots, jewelry, clothes, rooms, scenery, exhibitions, etc. is what bulks up the novel to about 900 pages. The New Yorker moaned, “At times, an excess of detail threatens to overwhelm the plot: no aquamarine glaze goes undescribed, no psychological process unmentioned.” But I reveled in the details since I’ve been on a steady diet of Ivy Compton-Burnett who doesn’t describe much beyond faces and body language. Like David Copperfield, this long novel is engrossing enough never to feel long, especially for hardcore readers like us who like rich ambitious novels of family drama mixed with social, cultural and art history.